5. Construction of Mar a Lago strained the Hutton’s marriage
During each of her marriages, Marjorie took her husband’s last name as her own, reverting to her maiden name after her divorces. Thus the Palm Beach newspapers and society discussed and dissected the new estate under construction by the “Hutton’s”. Marjorie and her husband discussed it too, often with exasperation expressed by the latter. E. F. Hutton told a friend visiting the house, “You know, Marjorie said she was going to build a little cottage by the sea. Look what we got”. Marjorie seldom discussed money in public, considering the subject vulgar. But in a letter to a cousin, Marjorie hinted at the tension in their marriage as a result of the cost overruns she encountered during construction.
“Apparently, building estimates are not worth the paper they are written on and, as a result, they have sunk our finances beyond anything we had imagined, so I have been having trouble with Ned about it…”, she wrote. She also said in the same letter, “… it means we have got to sell some of our Postum stock…”. Included in the construction costs were the prices of a collection of rare, first edition books purchased to stock the huge library. According to a former butler at the estate, the lush, oak-paneled library contained hundreds of such books, “…that no one in the family ever read”. Hutton’s exasperation at his wife’s spending extended to the exterior design as well, which he considered overly extravagant. According to some estimates, the final costs of construction and furnishing Mar a Lago exceeded the original commission more than eight times.